A Grotesque in the Garden by Wm. B. Eerdmans Publishing Co.

“[A Grotesque in the Garden] manages to blend the deeply spiritual and personal needs we all have with the ways in which our intellectual reflections can sometimes exacerbate our already fraught condition. It also reminds us that we can learn from one another, and even from fictional characters like Tesque and Naphil, if we would just enter honestly into such deeply personal discussions. While those can be harder to do with real people, the lessons learned from this engaging book can help even philosophers do them better.” — Matthew A. Benton in Faith and Philosophy “This is a delightful book. In terms of genre, it defies easy classification. But like Boethius’s Consolation of Philosophy, it is at once a gripping story of imaginative fiction, incorporating elements of history, myth, and allegory, as well as a deep and penetrating reflection on the problem of evil and the goodness of God.” — Jeffrey E. Brower in Journal of Analytic Theology “[A Grotesque in the Garden] allows for an exploration of philosophical space in a new register and encourages open-mindedness. It also brings an emotional dimension to philosophy of religion that is often lacking in academic writing.” — Helen de Cruz in Religious Studies

A Grotesque in the Garden Hud Hudson

Second Edition

William B. Eerdmans Publishing Company Grand Rapids, Michigan

Wm. B. Eerdmans Publishing Co. 4035 Park East Court SE, Grand Rapids, Michigan 49546 www.eerdmans.com © 2020 Hud Hudson All rights reserved Published 2020 Printed in the United States of America 26 25 24 23 22 21 20 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 ISBN 978-0-8028-7817-5 Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Names: Hudson, Hud, author. Title: A grotesque in the garden / Hud Hudson. Description: Second edition. | Grand Rapids, Michigan : William B. Eerdmans Publishing Company, 2020. | Previously independently published. | Includes bibliographical references. | Summary: “A short philosophical narrative about an angel wrestling with the decision to rebel against God and leave his post in the Garden of Eden”— Provided by publisher. Identifiers: LCCN 2020000624 | ISBN 9780802878175 (paperback) Subjects: LCSH: Philosophical theology. | Free will and determinism. | Theodicy. | Hidden God. | Fall of man. Classification: LCC BT40 .H835 2020 | DDC 231.7—dc23 LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2020000624

For Xerxes

Contents

Foreword by Michael Rea A Word from the Author to the Reader

ix xii

Part I Tesque 1. 2. 3. 4. 5. 6.

A Love Letter: From Dust to Dust Lazarai Stones The God of Silence Divine Deception Visions from the Tree Obedience or Rebellion?

3 15 26 38 56 67

Part II Joy 7. A Beast Sings

Part III Naphil 8. 9. 10. 11.

A Night Visitor 85 Misanthropy 94 O Infelix Culpa 108 Return to the Garden 117 Questions for Discussion Acknowledgments

119 153

vii

Foreword

The book of Genesis tells us that, after driving Adam and Eve out of

the Garden of Eden, God stationed “cherubim, and a sword flaming and turning” to guard the path to the tree of life.1 The wording in contemporary English translations seems to suggest that the flaming sword stood guard all by itself, with nobody wielding it, as in Book XII of John Milton’s Paradise Lost. But some interpreters put the sword in the hands of an angel, and sometimes the attending cherubim drop out of the picture altogether. One contemporary scholar reports that ancient Christian litanies identified the angel Uriel as the one who “stood at the gate of lost Eden, with the fiery sword.” Another explains how ancient and medieval Jewish exegesis led to naming the angel Lahtiel as the guardian of the path.2 Literary incarnations of either the solitary sword of fire or an angelic guardian of the tree are, so far as I can tell, rare. Perhaps the most well-known to contemporary readers is the angel Aziraphale from Neil Gaiman and Terry Pratchett’s Good Omens—a pretty good, but hardly perfect, citizen of heaven who promptly gives away his flaming sword out of compassion for Adam and Eve and then, over the course of the next several thousand years, cultivates a deep friendship with the demon who played the role of Eden’s “serpent.” In Hud Hudson’s A Grotesque in the Garden, the guardian at the 1. Gen. 3:24, New Revised Standard Version. 2. See Anscar Vonier, The Angels (New York: The Macmillan Company, 1928), 16, and Saul M. Olyan, A Thousand Thousands Served Him: Exegesis and the Naming of Angels in Ancient Judaism (Tübingen: J. C. B. Mohr, 1993), 71–74.

Foreword gate is Tesque—a creature of “superior dust” who whiles away his time in the garden reflecting on human beings and their lives as he sees them in visions delivered to him by Eden’s tree of knowledge. As we encounter Tesque, he has grown discontent in his isolation and has come to question his divine assignment and his duty to remain faithful to it. In describing his concerns and explaining the fatal decision he is contemplating, Tesque introduces us, his audience, to some of the most philosophically and pastorally important questions one might have about the Christian faith. Other characters, differently constituted, respond to Tesque’s arguments. What emerges from their collective thoughts is a portrait of some of the difficulties inherent in trying to fulfill the two greatest commandments—to love God with all one’s heart, mind, soul, and strength, and to love one’s neighbor as oneself. This is a splendid book—philosophically rich, beautifully written, and thoroughly engaging. As a teacher of college students, I have found the novel to be an excellent text for introducing undergraduates in thought-provoking ways to key issues in the philosophy of religion. As a lover of good fiction, I have greatly enjoyed spending time with and peering into the minds of the novel’s main characters—Tesque, Naphil, and the dog who christens himself “Lazaraistones.” The edition of the novel that you hold in your hands begins with “A Word from the Author to the Reader” that introduces the novel and concludes with supplementary material directing your attention to the variety of philosophical questions and disputes with which Tesque and Naphil are engaged. The supplementary material provides a lot of helpful guidance regarding issues one might wish to raise in a classroom setting or pursue on one’s own after finishing the book. This is a terrific resource. But there is much more in the novel that repays thought and attention besides its philosophical insights. Tesque, Naphil, and Lazaraistones are interesting literary characters in their own right, and it is worth asking questions about them, too. Tesque and Naphil are philosophers; Lazaraistones is not—and happily so. “Hard thoughts,” he thinks, are Tesque’s business, not x

Foreword his, and he sees that thinking hard thoughts is a big part of what contributes to Tesque’s persistent unhappiness. One is put in mind of Socrates’s opinion that “the unexamined life is not worth living,” and one might well wonder what significance there is in this fundamental difference between Tesque’s outlook and that of the faithful Lazaraistones. One might also wonder why Lazaraistones remains unseen by one of the novel’s main characters. The hiddenness of God looms large as a theme in this novel, and so it is hard to resist the thought that we as readers should spend some time reflecting on the hiddenness of Lazaraistones as well. What does this tell us about the character by whom he can’t be seen and about the reliability of that character’s musings? What significance can we find in Lazaraistones’s self-given name and in the way things turn out for him at the end? There is more that we might ask about these characters—and not just about them individually, but about their relationships to one another and even about how they relate to us, as readers. But perhaps it is best to leave those questions to you now as you join Tesque in his garden and Naphil in her cabin and reflect for yourself on the challenges that emerge from the questions with which they are struggling. Michael Rea

A Word from the Author to the Reader

A Grotesque in the Garden is a story of two spiritual mistakes, each arising as a different manifestation of the classic deadly sin of sloth—a deep resistance to the demands of love. According to the Christian tradition, we are all the recipients of two great commandments: Thou shalt love the Lord thy God with all thy heart, and with all thy soul, and with all thy mind, and thou shalt love thy neighbor as thyself.

This short novel depicts two individuals who fail to satisfy these commandments in different (yet complementary) ways. Despite the unusual biographies of the protagonists, this is very much an Everyman story. With the slightest effort the reader will recognize some similarity between the inordinate self-love and systematic self-deceit which dominates the inner lives of both main characters and features of the reader’s own psychological profile. Or, if not, St. Augustine was wrong about the ubiquity of such sin, and the reader belongs to a very select minority, indeed. The narrative revolves primarily around a particular individual that many of us have been introduced to in another and extremely well- known story, a person exquisitely well-positioned to raise a variety of philosophical puzzles and to articulate a range of critiques both of religion and of religious belief, but without doing so from an atheistic or agnostic point of view. In exploring this person’s unique location

xii

A Word from the Author to the Reader in creation, the story touches on a number of issues of philosophical and theological concern with emphasis on three main themes. First, on divinely permitted evil: The story presents a new approach to an increasingly popular argument designed to show that considerations rooted in evil should not incline us (to any degree) towards atheism or agnosticism. However, in carefully describing in detail and with precision the relevant defensive weapons that protect the theist in this first and major battle, it becomes all too evident just how they can be turned against the theist in the battles to come. Second, on divine silence and divine hiddenness: This discussion engages the multifaceted debates centered on the apparent silence and hiddenness of God, and it articulates a novel and worrisome line of reasoning designed to show why it may well be reasonable for creatures to refuse to cooperate with God by way of obedience, even if God exists and is both perfectly good and perfectly loving. Third, on divine deception: This portion of the narrative gives voice to an unfamiliar and troubling line of reasoning designed to show how disobedience to God can appear to be the only option available to us which embodies both the right and the good, despite the existence of a perfectly good and perfectly loving God with whose will it clashes rather than conforms. Just to be clear—I am not advocating all three lines of reasoning, but I have found it liberating to examine these themes with the freedom that comes with the distance of writing from the perspective of characters who differ from oneself. For my own part, I suspect the second and the third lines of reasoning are flawed. Nevertheless, I think the arguments which emerge on those topics are fascinating, and I (for one) don’t know where the flaws are located. They are certainly worth taking seriously. The character of Part I does so. The character of Part II can speak for himself. The final character of the piece, appearing in Part III, provides commentary upon and criticism of the major themes just recounted, as well as further philosophical reflection on a series of closely linked

xiii

A Word from the Author to the Reader secondary themes that run throughout the novel—the themes of the effects of sin on desire and thought, self-deception, moral luck, creaturely flourishing, the nature of divine love, and misanthropy. I began by saying that this is a story of two spiritual mistakes. The character of Part I ultimately fails in the first and greater commandment to love God, the character of Part III in the second to love neighbor. I suspect it is frightfully easy to fail (and miserably so) in both. Each does so, in true philosophical fashion, by being led astray in argument. A Grotesque in the Garden provides a sustained example of how certain philosophical arguments can seduce those who are suffering from the effects of sin on desire and thought (and who are thereby especially vulnerable to them) into ruining themselves—that is, on the assumption that they are bad arguments.

xiv

Part I TESQUE

One

A Love Letter: From Dust to Dust

I walk in the Garden alone and have so done each day since my

internment here began. I am a coward for not leaving. But perhaps today I shall leave, or if not today then tomorrow. For although I cannot die, I can cease—and a punishment of annihilation imposed by the One who abandoned me here is preferable to the withering charms of solitude in Paradise. As you will someday be, I too am simply a material thing— a rude chunk of matter—dust of a foreign kind, but nonetheless dust. To dust you will return eventually, for it is not given to you to be immortal in your present state. You will die before you are raised to eternal life. No such respite for me. No peaceful and temporary oblivion but only this uncertain and interminable waiting. I am bound by permanent dust which cannot (save momentarily) be disfigured, torn, or reshaped. I am dust on eternal watch. I am the guard dog of dust. That common perversion of angels as incorporeal wisps of tenderness and bliss—flitting here and there, mindlessly stroking the hair of sleeping children, moronically dancing on the proverbial pinhead, selflessly rescuing the unwary from invisible dangers, forever converting, counseling, curing, or comforting the whining multitudes, and piously praising the absent One day and night—ranks among the poorest fantasies ever conjured up by your fellow creatures. Know that your father who art in Eden is corporeal, is a glorious and imperishable body, but not as distorted by those inexplicably popular and 3

Tesque horrific painters of the cherubim, whose artistic vision culminates in portraits of immature little embarrassments looking fat, confused, and heavenward as if their only hope is to have someone happen by and drop a little caramel and faith in their mouths. I am of the glorious second line in the hierarchy. Mine is a body of terrible loveliness, four-countenanced, unadorned by bruise or blemish or age or decay, a body fierce, strong, and staggeringly beautiful. But unique to my kind, I have not been permitted to employ it in worship or even as chariot or throne of God—that blessed service allegedly reserved for my closest angelic kin. Nor have I been allotted a single hour in the company of my kin. Rather I have been cut away, brought into being only to be separated from my Maker and sentenced to pointless isolation in the Garden. I’ve even been denied the courtesy of being aware of His presence. All this time, and I’ve never even met Him. OOO

I was angry when I wrote that. Daughter, allow me to begin again. I say “daughter” because determining that particular outcome is among the few things remaining under my control. It’s not much power, but that’s how I’ll use it. So, daughter, allow me to begin again. I stand as a sentry charged with a task of prevention. You and your kind already know me obliquely by way of what you think a myth, a myth developed in your ancient Middle East, addressed to all, and recounted in the Holy Story. The book of Genesis speaks of a privileged and sacred place that played a unique role in the divine plan—of a Garden planted eastward in Eden—and it tells of the fall of two solitary figures from that Paradise. As told to you, the myth represents a series of events in the history of your ancestors. According to that history, these individuals were made just and right and yet in some manner or other freely rebelled and in so turning away from God damaged themselves and their progeny in a way neither they nor any of their descendants could rectify on their own power. 4

A Love Letter: From Dust to Dust Their disobedience was punished by banishment from the Garden and the loss of a certain innocence, immunity, safety, and grace. Those portions of the tale, I realize, are familiar enough. You will recall, however, that one strand of the narrative abruptly ends upon introducing a character whose fortunes are left unspecified. Yes, I am well aware the Holy Story reports that angels (in the plural), armed with flaming and ever-turning sword, were placed on the east side of the Garden to guard the Tree of Life and to bar any further entrance after its original inhabitants were driven hence—but it’s a lie. I alone was banished here. Or at least I am apprehensive about whether it is true. Perhaps another once stood on the opposite side of the gate, but if so, he chose non-existence over service in the first moments of our assignment and was never replaced. I find that thought disquieting and will return to it in due time. I believe my imprisonment is undeserved. Or if deserved, the reasons have been well hidden from me. I have stood my ground. I did not fall with the lost angels; I did not turn from God—not yet. Sometimes I have wondered whether my abandonment is deserved for acts I have yet to commit, for transgressions to come. Well, if so (then on the strength of His supreme goodness), I at least have the guarantee I will in fact commit them at some later time; otherwise His justice would be compromised. Some comfort, I suppose. Still, I remain unsatisfied with this explanation. My freedom, my mysterious and precious freedom, ensures that I am able to refrain from future disobedience, even if it should already be true now, in advance, that I will not refrain. My freedom is threatened only if I am compelled or forced, only if I somehow must rebel, not merely by a true report that as a result of my own beliefs, desires, intentions, and volition I shall. Accordingly, suppose it true now that I will later fall, but then, since this pre-imposed penalty for discarding my duty will have been among the causes of my fall, I cannot bring myself to regard my confinement as fitting or proper. If I do fall from this Garden and carry out my plan, success on 5

Tesque my part will surely ensure that you enter the world fatherless and I perish childless. Perhaps I will not be permitted a single step outside the Garden. Perhaps in that instant He shall remove his support from my being, and I shall softly vanish away as would anything so released by the divine hand and no longer attended to by the divine mind. Perhaps my sole attempt at personal rebellion will be thus permanently and quietly prevented. But I simply don’t believe a word of it. No—I, too, will be permitted a choice. I will enter the world unobstructed, and I will be allowed the freedom to ignore what I have been informed is my function and to refuse His command. I will be left alone to pursue my own ends, left alone, that is, until my purposes unacceptably cross His. And the cross is inevitable. Inevitable, for in the event of my leaving the Garden, my whole being will be bent toward one task, the only act of which I am capable that at once may make my own existence finally of some recognizable value to me and also may yield goodness to another beyond measure. Its price is to forfeit my own place in His realm, but, as I have explained, although I obey, I seem to have lost that already. He has forsaken me. Yet I will imitate Him. I will use my will to bring forth new life, though so doing has been strictly forbidden the angels. I will create you, dear daughter, and for this act I will almost certainly pay with myself. Still, despite missing each other in time, I wish to convey some account of my thoughts and choices and to speak to you here. No one has told my tale. Let this letter be its record. Even my name was omitted from the Holy Story. I am Tesque. You have undoubtedly been taught to think me under the Hebrew tool cherub, a term for the class of creatures especially blessed by propinquity to God. For others of my order in the angelic hierarchy this nearness bespeaks the great joy of intimate knowledge of and precious closeness to God. Whereas for me—it is nothing but a reminder of the unbridgeable proximity to all I want and cannot have, a span so modest but not traversable by such a one as you or I. I know of my angelic brothers by description, not acquain6

A Love Letter: From Dust to Dust tance, for as I remarked, I have never once been admitted into their company. I was not called to duty from my place in the choir. I can boast of no experience of the host of Heaven. My earliest memories one and all have their origin in the Garden as, I suspect, do I. The purpose of this curious provision has always eluded my understanding. Why invest me with knowledge that can only be salt in the wound of my isolation? Why gift me consciousness, rationality, and affect at all? I have been consigned to a trivial task which could be fulfilled by any Grotesque in the Garden, by any soulless and vacant carved stone so positioned that it wards off whatever mysterious enemy is to be kept away. So why gratuitously and cruelly invest what need be no more than a statue with desires and the knowledge of what would fulfill them, only to let its cravings go unattended and unsatisfied? Why cause your faithful statue pain? My first memories stand out as my most vivid—a turbulent sea of action. I woke to myself, fully formed and equipped with an understanding of my nature and my immediate directive. I stood visible both to myself and to the animals. And all in a moment creation had changed irrevocably, for there was now something that it was like to be the unique entity that is me, to possess my particular center of awareness, to be frightened and bewildered by the understanding that those individuals most similar to me in Paradise had somehow transgressed, and to be subjected to a nearly overwhelming compulsion to drive them from the Garden. My counterpart on the other side of the gate—if the rumor of his existence in the Holy Story is to be trusted—although presumably as new and confused as I, refused to be party to their banishment. But I . . . I unhesitatingly obeyed the command that so powerfully accompanied my creation. Without pause or reflection, I forced those poor creatures from the Garden and closed the gate. Immediately upon your ancestors exiting this place, the Garden was—how shall I put it?—raised. I now lie above you, like an author’s pen above the letters on the page (a pen, not an author, for thus far 7

Tesque I have been permitted only the functions of an instrument). And yet for ages now, the Garden and I have been separate from but nearer your world than you might suspect. Your kind cannot so much as point in my direction or reduce the distance between us by a hair’s breadth on your own power, but you are lower creatures, and not all directions are open to you. Thinking otherwise is the parochialism of the hands of a clock that imagine there is no direction in which they do not eventually point, since they describe an entire circle when given enough time. You can no more approach or recede from me than the hands of that clock can betray their fixed orbits. North, east, south, west—point those faithful arrows—never out. Left, right, forth, back, up, down—you move in your three-space cell—never towards me. And again, intolerably, the pointlessness of my quarantine becomes salient. I apparently have little need to prepare to conduct battle to prevent re-entry of the Garden, since it cannot even so much as be found unless your kind acquires the power of movement in my direction or else it is again lowered in accordance with the twists and turns of the indecipherable divine plan. But until that eventuality transpires—to address just what threat, exactly, am I so crucially placed on watch? I have had all I can stand of the five sisters—isolation, alienation, abandonment, loneliness, and solitude. A few words on each. Isolation is born of distance, and distance is the saddest relation. It carves. It singles. It individuates. Like you, I am placed, I have a location, but I never share it with another. Movement is permitted but contact forbidden. Although I am of foreign dust, I am fragmented—composed of tiny shards and insensible particles, parts cursed with repulsive forces that keep one another and any other objects at bay with all the power and authority of natural law—as, indeed, are you and all creation. In approaching another, my very nature ensures that I merely force it hence—as does yours and all creation’s. The thought is simply not sufficiently appreciated; genuine embrace is illusory. Of course, I can achieve an approxima8

A Love Letter: From Dust to Dust tion of closeness so as to no longer perceive a distance between my parts and those of my affections, but imperceptible and ineliminable pockets of emptiness still serve to isolate us. Total I wish to mix with another—to enjoy even momentarily the same place, but I am denied even touch. As if mocking my angelic kind, I am always near but never fully co-present with another. That exquisite pleasure our Maker reserved for himself and then apparently discarded unused. Omnipresence could afford co-location for each of us, one to another, and yet for reasons I cannot understand this delight has been passed over in favor of mandatory separation. Instead, He has contracted His presence to secure and accommodate my isolation. He has made room for me not by sharing his space but by withdrawing himself, and I—unavoidably, unwillingly, and in his image—can share this world with my fellow living and nonliving creatures only by withdrawing from them in turn. Alienation is possible in company or in seclusion; it requires only that you are in some manner expelled or prevented from returning somewhere or reuniting with someone or someones to whom you belong. I enjoy none of the pleasures of being amongst my angelic brothers; they are my people, not these stones and this dirt. Still, just as this Garden gate effectively bars entrance to the world, so too am I so securely and remotely locked away that I am not even marginalized, for I am not even on the page. The pain of alienation intensifies when, rather than resulting from some accident of fortune, it is caused by a misuse of will, by being intentionally wronged as when, in His infinite wisdom, God marooned me on this island-Garden for reasons that He has not seen fit to share with me. But I see I have become angry again. I should take back the remark about the misuse of free will. I should say rather that in my abandonment I have been harmed rather than wronged, for God (unlike the rest of us) cannot fail to perform His moral obligations. Of course, not all intentional harmings are moral wrongs, but the harms hurt all the same, especially when they are prolonged and inexplicable and originate in someone you believe loves you. Was 9

Tesque there no other permissible alternative available to Him that did not require my abandonment here? How could my sorry corner of the world possibly be a non-negotiable moment of the divine plan? Loneliness is a felt experience, a complex emotional state, an unsatisfied desire for togetherness. It is unpredictable, unpleasant, independent, and of its own mind. Perhaps it will join in force with isolation, perhaps it won’t. You may find it keeping company with alienation or wholly absent from that condition, supplanted by indignation or rage. It can worsen abandonment or be altogether indifferent in the face of betrayal. When it does arrive, however, it dominates. One’s entire landscape, internal and external, is painted in its muted and unhappy colors. Even goodness loses its magnetism, and what is beautiful seems distorted. But I realize I hardly need to explain loneliness to you or to anyone. It is our one shared inheritance. No one honest can consider it a stranger. Solitude is the only member of the quintet not inherently disvaluable. Where the other elements burn and injure, solitude could be a balm and a restorative if only it were occasionally punctuated with interaction. Solitude harbors hidden treasures—the reintegration of a fragmented self, a gradual discovery of one’s deepest values, an enriched harmony with one’s environment, the autonomy made possible only through freedom from all engagement with and responsibility to others. Yet this deep and awesome well can run dry. And I—well—I am replenished enough. Already I know myself and what matters to me all too clearly. I am perfectly attuned to this my paradisiacal prison. The harmony cannot be improved upon, but the music is dying. In passing the endless cycle of seasons, I walk the Garden. Your sun no longer shines upon this ground, but the Garden glows with its own light, and the brightening and dimming of the light is my day and night. The river flows under the walls into the Garden and then out again, who knows from or to where or how? The flowers and trees bud, bloom, beautify, fade, drop petals and leaves, and naked, shiver in the silent shadows of the dark snows of a Garden Winter 10

A Love Letter: From Dust to Dust only to find new colors in the crisp air, fresh breeze, and warm rain of a Garden Spring. Morning after morning I begin by tracing the same intricate path. Along the way I touch the same flowers on the same petals in the same order and every hundredth step is twice the distance of each of its ninety-nine predecessors. It’s not as if anything harmful can befall me or visit corruption on the Garden should I forget a flower or misstep the path, but one needs the ritual of patterns, and I have systems from which I must not stray. I spend afternoons wading and confessing to the patient but uninterested river, letting its waters wash over me as I recall with longing the exquisite beauty and vitality of the once-present but long-departed animals. I pay my respects by reciting with fond remembrance the names of the twelve I christened when we so briefly shared the Garden together. Those were the twelve who on at least one occasion saw me, and it is so very good to have been seen by anyone or anything. I cared for them. There are nearly four hundred and eighty million different ways to recite their names in order, twelve thousand of which I achieve each day after stepping into but before exiting the river. The sequence requires almost a century and a decade to complete, yet I have brought the circuit to its end more times than I care to remember. Evenings are occupied in appreciative fascination, perplexity, and most often sorrow—in a fashion I will be able to describe momentarily. Profoundly black, unspeakably still, and sleepless nights crawl by while I compulsively calculate and classify everything: I count days. I count hours. I count seconds. I count colors. I count sounds. I count odors. I count tastes. I count textures. I count memories. I count desires. I count fears. I count hopes. I count questions. I count uncertainties. I count types I count. I count pains. I count my friends, whose number is two. My first and oldest friend is mathematics. Individual numbers and shapes, of course, are not friends, but I have found they are companions. The sublimity of 11

Tesque their relations to one another is as inexhaustible as it is inexpressible, penetrating (to my modest capacity) the depths of those relations fills me with awe, and the momentary release I experience from losing myself in those discoveries the closest thing I know to joy. Her equations call to me, her certainty cheers me, unveiling her structure delights me, her subject matter exhausts and bests me, and her necessity and immutability reassures me there is always some goodness in the world of which I may partake no matter where I am. My second friend is the magnificent and awful Tree. Not of Life. Her I leave alone. I speak of the Tree of Knowledge, my only living companion in the Garden who is also aware of me. He is my nourishment and my window out of Eden. I eat the succulent offerings of his branches and thereby come to see in all its splendor and sordidness the details of your world. Of your multicolored history I am a transfixed and devoted student. Thus do I spend each evening by his side watching the passings of your wretched and wonderful lives. I am an expert on cruelty; I’ve seen its many faces, and I can’t look away. But also how often I have witnessed inexplicable sacrifice and mutual caregiving. How such events ever surface amidst such misery is a mystery, and yet there they are time and time again. What a tapestry! What a world weaved of time and chance, horrors and beauty, suffering and love! I know the Tree is aware of this and wills our one-way communication, but he does not join. I speak, and he remains silent. I sing, and he remains silent. I plead, and he remains silent. I pray, but I remain silent. Still, I count him my second and only other friend. Shall I describe for you a recurring fear? Just as my brothers the seraphim have been closely linked with love, we cherubim have been intimately associated with knowledge. And yet, sometimes, in the midst of my longing for companionship, I suffer doubts and uncertainty and fantasize about whether God has created only myself and the Garden and whether there is anything at all where the river water rushes as it disappears under the Garden’s walls. Foolish, of course,

A Love Letter: From Dust to Dust but the thought persistently and irrationally continues to reassert itself. Could it be that this infernal Garden exhausts all of creation? If so, otherwise unanswerable questions about why He would permit your world to remain so deplorable in so many ways and why He would not interfere with the sickening ruin of so many of His beloved creatures might receive a simple answer: God doesn’t permit those atrocities; they aren’t real, for the extent of the cosmos is the extent of the Garden, and I am genuinely alone and deceived. Don’t misunderstand me: I don’t doubt and never have doubted His existence any more than I can doubt my own. In fact, I don’t think such doubt is possible for one of my nature. But certainty stops there. Where is He? Why create an entire world and then play the truant? What would be the point? Why bother to call thinking matter into being, instill in it an insatiable desire to unite with its source, and then hide like an ill-mannered child while it suffers unto death? But then what would such a hypothesis make of my own situation? Are the visions afforded by the Tree simply magnificent illusions, brilliant but fabricated scenarios of a fictional world all designed to test or to torture me? No, I can’t seriously entertain that my private torture could be His object, but His aims (whatever they are) are impenetrable. And, as for the alternative, to what possible end would I be tested? To see how long I will blindly obey without explanation or direction? How much value could be embedded in discovering the answer to that? Enough. These reflections are embarrassing. Obviously, your world is real and others with whom I might interact—my glorious and angelic siblings, your pitiful and wonderful race, the simple and loving brutes—do exist. I am not some sort of unique and meaningless experiment, and my longings have real rather than imaginary objects. I hereby refuse to indulge or nourish such thoughts of quasi-solipsism any longer. It’s just that I’ve been denied companionship for so very long that I’ve even wished to exchange duties with the Messenger of Death,

Tesque thus ensuring at least some communion with all creatures, however brief. His is such a sublime charge—to share in each person’s last moments while providing comfort and tenderness. Enviable—Angel of Death, not for the kill, but for the kiss. One’s holy task—on each bestow the loving touch of lip on lip. But for all that—he is where he is, and I am where I am. And once I fall from this place, you will come into being and be where you are.